As the communal carnage in Gujarat enters its third month, the Vajpayee government has fashioned a three-pronged strategy: brazen out the opprobrium, attack domestic and international critics of Narendra Modi for "interfering" in "internal" matters (of party and nation), and stage farcical "peace marches" to further terrorise Gujarat's religious minorities – as George Fernandes and his ink did on 28 April. This strategy must be comprehensively defeated in the interests of the people not just of India, but all of South Asia. This criticism must be sustained.
Vajpayee would like to depict the diabolical violence in Gujarat as a "communal riot" or as an "understandable", "spontaneous", "natural" retaliation for the terrible 27 February Godhra episode in which 58 Hindus were burnt alive. In reality, the violence has been a one-sided, targeted, systematic, massacre – a pogrom of Muslims. Yet, the Indian foreign ministry's official report, posted on its website, does not even mention Muslims.
Far from being spontaneous, the Gujarat violence was pre-planned and in the making for weeks. The 24 hour-long gap between the supposed "trigger event" and the butchery that began on 28 February, the geographical extent of the violence, and the collusive involvement of the state, all reinforce the conclusion.
Gujarat marks a South Asian watershed. It is this region's worst pogrom of a religious/ethnic minority in half a century, sponsored and organised by the state. Even the massacre of the Sikhs` after Indira Gandhi's assassination in 1984 pales beside it in sheer cruelty and in the overt nature of the state's involvement.